A variety of content from content providers may be provided to a plurality of clients via a network operator or head end in addition to television programming, such as web pages and so on. For example, content requested by a client may be specific to a client (e.g., account data) or may be common to multiple clients (e.g., programming data). To minimize requests to the content providers, a head end may cache the content that is common to multiple clients.
For instance, the content provider may make this content available “over the wire” to clients for a time period that has already been requested and provided to a single client. Thus, subsequent clients may obtain the content which is “over the wire” from the cache without another request to, or contacting of, the content provider.
However, since clients may obtain content that is “over the wire” or cached at the head end without a request or contact with the content provider, a head end is not provided with a direct mechanism to gauge how many times particular content is accessed by clients and to optimize the cache by prioritizing which content should be cached and for how long. Consequently, a head end may be limited to using a default time period to cache each requested item of content, which does not correlate the cached content and time period with the most popular content, and does not efficiently use cache space.